


Think Of It As Romantic

by rilla



Category: Journey's End - Sheriff
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:43:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Osborne and Stanhope: how their friendship (and more) evolved. ("Don't get yourself killed, Uncle," he said briskly. "I'm not sure what the devil I'd do.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Think Of It As Romantic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [necklaceofrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/necklaceofrain/gifts).



> I've messed with the timeline of the play a little bit, I hope that's okay! The poem at the end is by Raymond Carver. Happy holidays! :)

To begin with, it had been a sort of enjoyment to look at him. It was an enjoyable experience, to look at this young dynamic man with his abrupt smile and the curl on his forehead where his hair refused to stay combed back into place. Osborne had found Stanhope to be oddly appealing. Fresh-faced. Not in the naive way in which Raleigh would later endear himself, but initially there had been a sort of thoughtful wishfulness about Stanhope that had been quite sweet, had made Osborne want to talk to him despite Stanhope's superior rank and the difference in years between them, despite the combat that Stanhope had already seen and that was robbing him of his spirit even when Osborne had only just met him.

After talking to Stanhope, Osborne found out that that thoughtfulness had been paired with a keen intellect and a hard-as-nails drive to succeed, to do, to do _well_, no matter the consequences. That sort of action about a man was the sort of thing that Osborne had always appreciated. He noted and appreciated the clean swift motion of Stanhope's stride, the crispness of his uniform, the sarcastic drawl of his voice that came out whenever he was unimpressed with something – which was quite often, as a matter of fact. Stanhope did not appear to be able to tolerate stupidity very easily.

That coupled with the unsure wistfulness about Stanhope's eyes that would be stamped out over the next few months very much endeared him to Osborne and somehow, when Osborne sat with him and asked him quiet questions, the boy blossomed like a flower. It reminded him of difficult boys he had seen in his classrooms; not those who had no interest in learning, but rather those who had a sort of gritted fragility about their faces, those who opened up to anyone who showed them the least bit of attention.

After time, Stanhope had learned. Had learned how to keep that curl off his forehead, brushed neatly into place instead. He lost some of the boyishness about his face; his jawline squared and his lips became thinner, more ragged and bitten. Shadows grew beneath his eyes as though he dreamt of ghosts, and his skin lost that boyish youthfulness that Osborne had smiled indulgently on for the first couple of weeks, and held a sort of yellowish pallor instead. The sun seemed to make him sallow rather than golden. His voice grew clipped, softness somehow unbelievably reserved for Osborne, others feeling the sharp side of his tongue as though it was a whip.

Inwardly, Osborne marvelled at Stanhope's favouring him. Inwardly he could not help but favour him back, although he had not found it hard to make friends among the other soldiers. Neither did Stanhope, despite his occasional tempers and his fondness for whiskey; he had the sort of manner about him that attracted other men, made him watchable and charismatic and an exemplary officer. Osborne felt privileged and touched to be his favourite, the one that Stanhope relaxed, if minutely, around, and was further sobered when he thought more about it and came to the conclusion that however much he cared about Stanhope, his feelings were more than reciprocated.

*

Stanhope had oddly girlish features, he noted several months later as they sat together eating soup that had once had something to do with beef. He had those big dark eyes rimmed with long black lashes, as though he was a girl kohled up for a night out with her young man, and high cheekbones (although the flush had gone from them months before, when he had stopped sleeping well). His nose was well-shaped and not particularly large, and his eyebrows were dark and tapered. His mouth was full-lipped and excruciatingly expressive, although he seemed to struggle to make it otherwise. He was a good-looking man, in a way that puzzled Osborne somewhat. Surely his oddly beautiful face was at odds with his tall frame and shoulders that screamed of playing rugby a long time ago when he had been somebody else entirely. His mobile mouth twisted around biting sarcasm that made muscles in other men's face twitch, and then the shadow-lined eyes looked at Osborne for a brief moment as if to apologise. And then the hard set of the lips would resume, resume, would always resume.

The difference between the changes Stanhope underwent in a matter of months was palpable. Sometimes Osborne wondered what he'd been like at eighteen, nineteen – perhaps with an infectious laugh, a sense of humour unencumbered by darkness. He wondered how much he'd changed since the beginning of the war, at what stage in Stanhope's cycle of falling he had swooped in to break his landing just a little, if he could help at all.

*

Stanhope's drinking had been something Osborne always noted, although the time that six boys got blown up was the time it was particularly bad for the first time. When Osborne got back from duty Stanhope was slumped over the table, Trotter in a bed across the way, to all intents sound asleep and facing the wall. He'd always left Stanhope to Osborne, which was probably the safest option.

Osborne approached Stanhope slowly, said (although it was highly irregular to call him by his first name) "Dennis?" in a loud whisper.

"I'm awake," Stanhope said as he jerked upright.

"Are you?" Osborne approached him with a smile that he hoped was reassuring and kind.

"Mmm." Stanhope's eyelids were drooping. "Oh God. My head hurts."

"I bet." Osborne glanced around before seizing on a small metal cup of water. "Drink this." He held it out to Stanhope.

"Would you believe I'm not thirsty?" Stanhope let out an unpleasant laugh, apparently intended to show the irony of the situation. All it did was make Osborne feel acutely sad as he surveyed the ruin in front of him. For a moment he wondered if this was the sort of thing it was possible to come back from.

"What about some air? Let's get you some air," he offered instead.

"Yes." Stanhope nodded decisively. "Air would be good."

He staggered as he stood, leaning heavily on the table, and weaved an unsteady path towards Osborne. "How strange. My legs aren't going as they usually do," he said hazily.

"That is a huge surprise," Osborne told him very seriously and another odd laugh bubbled out of Stanhope as he looped an arm around Osborne's shoulders and allowed himself to be led up and into the cool night air.

"Give us a kiss, Uncle," he said once they were outside, as he often did when he'd been drinking, and smiled the sort of smile that Osborne rarely saw from him. He felt as though it was the sort of smile that had been lost somewhere along the way, that Stanhope had discarded and put into some sort of locked box in his mind, assuming he would never need to use it again.

More unusually, Stanhope reached out and cupped a hand around Osborne's jaw, his touch surprisingly assured and competent. He gazed at Osborne's face; Osborne could feel his breath on his face. It smelled appalling, but in a normal sort of way. Still, it was warm. "You don't look your age," he said then, hand still there, thumb stroking very gently.

"I'm delighted to hear it." Osborne detangled himself, and instructed, "Breathe in strongly."

Stanhope did so, looking very serious, and then abruptly leaned forward to vomit.

"Oh God," he said as though he was praying, and then vomited again. "Oh God."

Osborne smoothed his hand over the back of his neck. "Let it out. I'm here." Stanhope's hair was curly soft tendrils beneath his palm. "You're all right. You're not alone."

*

Once Stanhope had turned to Osborne while he was smoking, enjoying the suck and twang of his tobacco, and said decidedly, "I like your pipe."

Osborne had blinked over at him. "Well, I wish you'd tell my wife that," he said good-naturedly. "She doesn't let me smoke it inside. She says the hearth smokes enough without my helping it."

Stanhope's gaze had become stuck on a slightly rotten board on the floor. "Well, I like it." He let out a deep breath and picked up his glass, staring into it and swirling the amber depths before apparently deciding that more water was required. He got up, all smoothness to replace the boyish jerky energy that he had shaken off along with his forehead curl and his easy smiles, and crossed to the cup of clean water on the edge of the table. He poured some into his glass.

"Your wife," he said, turning to look at Osborne with an odd intrepid expression on his face. "What's she like?"

"She's," Osborne said, and suddenly found it difficult to say much about her. He thought momentarily of taking out the picture of her that he carried with him always, but did not. "I'm happy with her," he said instead.

"I'm not sure I could love a woman," Stanhope said, after a moment. "I can't imagine it."

"Have you," Osborne began cautiously, and wondered how best to phrase it. "Have you _been_ with a woman?" he asked finally.

Stanhope stared at him for a moment, eyes wide, and then laughed shortly. "Of _course_ I've been with a woman. I refuse to be one of those terribly tragic young men who comes to war and dies a virgin. I've been with _several_ women, in fact," he continued.

"Several?" Osborne mused, and looked at Stanhope with a sceptical eyebrow raised.

Stanhope shook his head, wrinkling his nose in good-natured concession. "Well, two," he admitted. He came back over to Osborne's bunk and sat next to him on the edge of it, his glass still in his hand. He took a sip of it, clearly savouring it. "The first was a girl in London. The second was a girl in Paris. I was worried I would get – you know." He made a somewhat vulgar hand gesture. "But all seems clear and healthy."

"I'm glad to hear it," Osborne said, voice as dry as he could muster.

"Such touching concern regarding the health of... well, certain regions of my person." A faint flush had suffused Stanhope's cheekbones and he raised his glass to his mouth again as though to hide it.

Osborne huffed out a quiet laugh, feeling somehow that they were sitting too close together, but not particularly wanting to move. He did not know what precisely was making him uncomfortable. Surely he wasn't doing anything that was, specifically, wrong. "Well, you fellows do call me 'Uncle'. It's my job to maintain a cordial yet supportive presence."

"Uncle," Stanhope said reflectively, and caught Osborne's eye. "I know it's a very popular name for you now, but I can't help but regret it. It seems all too... fatherly. Familial."

"You don't think of me as fatherly?" Osborne couldn't help but enquire.

"_Fatherly_?" Stanhope got to his feet again and strode over to his cigarette-box, almost upsetting his drink in the process. "No. Not fatherly. Protective, perhaps."

"And you don't object to that."

"I feel..." Stanhope looked contemplatively into his glass before putting it down and resting a cigarette between his lips. "No. I don't object. I thank God for you every day." He looked at Osborne hard and his face changed for a moment as though a ghost had flickered its way over it. "Don't get yourself killed, Uncle," he said briskly. "I'm not sure what the devil I'd do." He lit the cigarette, and Osborne noted that his hands looked as though they were shaking a little.

*

And then when they'd been on leave at the same time. Paris in the cold spring sun, iced blue skies hanging overhead. Osborne stayed for a night before crossing to England. Stanhope had found rooms in a shabby little street and said, some sort of odd nerviness cast on the set of his shoulders, "You could stay with me for a night before you go home."

Osborne looked up into the clear sky. He could not hear gunfire, although earlier had felt Stanhope grip his arm tightly when a metal table had blown over with a resounding crash.

"I don't see why not," he said reflectively. Leave did not last for very long and he couldn't deny that he wanted to get home, but the thought of leaving Stanhope alone in Paris for the whole time was not one he particularly relished. There was nothing like the family you created for yourself among the other soldiers, after all.

Stanhope looked at him then, his dark hair blown about his face, messy and soft, his full mouth red in the cold air. He looked the same later, messy-haired and terribly young as his uniform fell to the floor. He was always one of the neatest in the trenches but looked grubby in this room with its clean white sheets and blue curtains hat were moving lightly, gusting on the breeze. The skin on his shoulders was smooth and pale, and Osborne had seen him unclothed before, but not like this. Never like this.

It wasn't wrong, he told himself as he avoided Stanhope's eyes and unbuttoned his shirt. It wasn't wrong, feeling another man's hands resting lightly on his hips, wasn't wrong to feel another stubbled chin against his own. Nobody could understand what they went through except each other. Nobody could realise how acute their experiences were. Nobody could understand how much he needed this except for this black-eyed man-boy before him, all tousled hair and strong hands.

"I can't believe that you want to," he began, feeling horribly decrepit and old in front of this stone-carved demigod, but Stanhope said merely, "Shh, shh," and pressed a kiss to his jaw, and then another on the corner of his mouth, cool hands moving up and down the ache of Osborne's spine. Stanhope was usually tense but in Paris he seemed somehow different, as though perhaps he had found a little of himself again.

*

After Raleigh came and everything changed, one night Osborne and Stanhope stood outside together for a moment, savouring a rare moment of solitude and silence.

"They're quiet tonight," Stanhope observed, after a while.

"Yes," Osborne returned.

They looked into the sky together for a couple of minutes. There were no stars. Sometimes Osborne was afraid he would forget what an English countryside night sky was like, all velvety inky blue and tiny pinpricks of light. Once upon a time he'd thought it the most magical sight imaginable, but then there had been a man gasping against his mouth between cool white sheets, later a lock of dark hair stuffed into an envelope in a pocket that Osborne had stitched shut, and Osborne's definition of beauty had changed unutterably.

"You like the boy, don't you," Stanhope said then, a thousand miles away from Paris. "He's a nuisance."

"Yes," Osborne agreed vaguely, and then added, lips curling very slightly with a smile, "to both statements."

Stanhope looked sideways at him. "I think he's a good person, though. He reminds me of..."

"Yes. Me too. Or he would remind me of you, had I known you back then."

"Mmm, well." Stanhope set his jaw. Osborne could smell whisky fumes emanating off his flesh, through the trickle of sweat blazing on his temple."People change."

"It's unavoidable. You're a good man," Osborne told him, and truly meant it. He was not quite as good as Raleigh had once believed, but then that was impossible. Men were men, fallible and mad and unhappy, and Stanhope was no different. The striving, though - the striving to protect and to get through, the unswerving distant light of love, the things that Stanhope could not let go of - those were the things that made him better than other men. The things that made him into the man that Osborne felt such painfully sweet affection for.

"You're better," Stanhope pointed out bluntly.

"I don't think so. I'm just older," Osborne told him, and smiled at Stanhope's profile. He looked as though his skin had turned to silver in the moonlight, a statue poised there, still but for the muscle working in his jaw. And then:

"I love you terribly," Stanhope said in a rush, still looking up into the sky, and reached out to grip Osborne's forearm, fingers digging in as though he would never let go.

*

When Osborne died, the things that went with him:

The scent of his daughter's hair at the crown of her head, the softness of it against his face as he picked her up and spun her round and round until she was dizzy and laughing.

The sound of his wife's voice late at night those nights on leave when he could not relax because of the quiet and the shaking, and she stroked his hair with smooth hands and whispered him to sleep.

The look of Stanhope asleep next to him that night in Paris, that one unruly curl flopping down over his forehead, a small smile etched across his lips, as though for some brief moment somewhere amidst his dreams he had found peace.

*

_And did you get what  
you wanted from this life, even so?  
I did.  
And what did you want?  
To call myself beloved, to feel myself  
beloved on the earth._


End file.
